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virus researcher and a contributor to Western literature on the subject. He had been invited to submit papers and to lecture at West European computer security conferences: he was recognized as an authority on viruses, particularly those from Eastern Europe.

Vesko’s reputation was due, in large part, to having been in the right place at the right time. What became known as the Bulgarian virus factory started to roll out bug after bug, each more dangerous than the last. Vesko was there to record it. He was in the eye of the storm, collecting viruses from all over Bulgaria as they spread from computer to computer. By 1991 he was reporting two new locally grown viruses each week.

In a country with quite so many bugs flying around, it was inevitable that Bulgarian computers would become overrun. Most computers in the country had been hit at least once; many had been hit with multiple viruses at the same time. Because Vesko was the country’s leading authority on the malicious programs, he was eventually given responsibility for co-ordinating Bulgaria’s effort to fight them off. He was constantly on call. Days he worked in his office in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where he was given the dour title of Assistant Research Worker Engineer. At weekends and nights Vesko continued the fight from his own cramped room on a borrowed Bulgarian clone of an IBM PC. He dealt with ten to twenty phone calls each day from institutions or firms that had been attacked by viruses.

The Bulgarian virus factory was by then in full production. It was no longer a matter of Vesko and his friend Teodor, one a researcher, the other a virus writer. Bulgaria had spawned some of the most skilled and prolific virus writers in the world.

In Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest town, a student named Peter Dimov produced a series of viruses ‘as revenge against his tutor’ and another two ‘in tribute’ to his girlfriend, Nina (it is not known if she was pleased). One of Peter’s ambitions was to write the world’s smallest virus: his first came to under 200 bytes. Later he wrote one only forty-five bytes long. For a few weeks it was the shortest virus known – until another Bulgarian programmer produced one that was just thirty bytes. Peter was also the author of the first Bulgarian boot-sector virus as well as two ominous-sounding bugs which he called

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